|
|
Arts in the provincial capital of Hangzhou. By 1968 the academy had become the epicenter of art and literary propaganda. Shen’s painting Chairman Mao Attends the First Congress of the Chinese Communist Party at South Lake (1968) that was exhibited in his hometown city of Jiaxing, Zhejiang, did not go unnoticed. Zhang Yongsheng, chairman of the Provincial Revolutionary Committee, as well as an artist and graduate of the academy, arranged for Shen to practice painting at the academy for more than three months in 1969 and gave him access and borrowing rights to the library, even though the library was officially closed. Zhang also arranged for an eminent oil painter to provide Shen with guidance and supervision.
By 1968 middle-school graduates were being sent to work on farms for reeducation by poor and lower-middle peasants; alternatively, they could choose to work on farms in remote frontier regions and receive a state salary. In June of 1970 Shen volunteered for duty in Heilongjiang Province where the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) of the Shenyang Military Region had established the Heilongjiang Production and Construction Corps in June of 1968. He was duly assigned to the 42nd regiment of the 4th division of the Corps that was located ten kilometers from the Soviet border. The Heilongjiang regiments consisting of tens of thousands of resettled soldiers and laborers were all stationed in Beidahuang (a.k.a. the Great Northern Wilderness), a vast region of black earth along the basins of the Ussuri, Songhua, and Amur Rivers. When Shen arrived, 400,000 middle-school graduates had also settled there. Each regiment had armed soldiers ready to fight the Soviet, but most of the soldiers had no weapons and were clearly farm workers. Beidahuang was in fact the nation’s granary.
Propaganda work was a priority in all PLA projects. Within a year, Shen was appointed art worker to illustrate model-worker slides for screening and to take charge of producing propaganda posters. Before long, he was selected to join the annual three-month Art Class at Corps Headquarters